Generative Mechanisms Transforming The Social Order

Download or read book Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order written by Margaret S. Archer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-02-18 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines how generative mechanisms emerge in the social order and their consequences. It does so in the light of finding answers to the general question posed in this book series: Will Late Modernity be replaced by a social formation that could be called Morphogenic Society? This volume clarifies what a ‘generative mechanism’ is, to achieve a better understanding of their social origins, and to delineate in what way such mechanisms exert effects within a current social formation, either stabilizing it or leading to changes potentially replacing it . The book explores questions about conjuncture, convergence and countervailing effects of morphogenetic mechanisms in order to assess their impact. Simultaneously, it looks at how products of positive feedback intertwine with the results of (morphostatic) negative feedback. This process also requires clarification, especially about the conditions under which morphostasis prevails over morphogenesis and vice versa. It raises the issue as to whether their co-existence can be other than short-lived. The volume addresses whether or not there also is a process of ‘morpho-necrosis’, i.e. the ultimate demise of certain morphostatic mechanisms, such that they cannot ‘recover’. The book concludes that not only are generative mechanisms required to explain associations between variables involved in the replacement of Late Modernity by Morphogenic Society, but they are also robust enough to account for cases and times when such variables show no significant correlations.

Download or read book Social Morphogenesis written by Margaret S. Archer and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-02-20 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rate of social change has speeded up in the last three decades, but how do we explain this? This volume ventures what the generative mechanism is that produces such rapid change and discusses how this differs from late Modernity. Contributors examine if an intensification of morphogenesis (positive feedback that results in a change in social form) and a corresponding reduction in morphostasis (negative feedback that restores or reproduces the form of the social order) best captures the process involved. This volume resists proclaiming a new social formation as so many books written by empiricists have done by extrapolating from empirical data. Until we can convincingly demonstrate that a new generative mechanism is at work, it is premature to argue what accounts for the global changes that are taking place and where they will lead. More concisely we seek to answer the question whether or not current social change can be regarded as social morphogenesis. Only then, in the next volumes will the same team of authors be able to remove the question mark.

Download or read book Structure, Culture and Agency written by Tom Brock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Margaret Archer is a leading critical realist and major contemporary social theorist. This edited collection seeks to celebrate the scope and accomplishments of her work, distilling her theoretical and empirical contributions into four sections which capture the essence and trajectory of her research over almost four decades. Long fascinated with the problem of structure and agency, Archer’s work has constituted a decade-long engagement with this perennial issue of social thought. However, in spite of the deep interconnections that unify her body of work, it is rarely treated as a coherent whole. This is doubtless in part due to the unforgiving rigour of her arguments and prose, but also a byproduct of sociology’s ongoing compartmentalisation. This edited collection seeks to address this relative neglect by collating a selection of papers, spanning Archer’s career, which collectively elucidate both the development of her thought and the value that can be found in it as a systematic whole. This book illustrates the empirical origins of her social ontology in her early work on the sociology of education, as well as foregrounding the diverse range of influences that have conditioned her intellectual trajectory: the systems theory of Walter Buckley, the neo-Weberian analysis of Lockwood, the critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar and, more recently, her engagement with American pragmatism and the Italian school of relational sociology. What emerges is a series of important contributions to our understanding of the relationship between structure, culture and agency. Acting to introduce and guide readers through these contributions, this book carries the potential to inform exciting and innovative sociological research.

Download or read book The Nature of Social Reality written by Tony Lawson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The social sciences often fail to examine in any systematic way the nature of their subject matter. Demonstrating that this is a central explanation of the widely acknowledged failings of the social sciences, not least of modern economics, this book sets about rectifying matters. Providing an account of the nature of social material in general, as well as of the specific natures of central components of the modern world, such as money and the corporation, Lawson also considers the implications of this theory regarding possibilities for social change. Readers will gain an understanding of how social phenomena, from tables and chairs, to money and firms, and nurses and Presidents are constituted. Fundamental to Lawson’s conception is a theory of community-based social positioning, whereby people and things within a community become constituted as components of emergent totalities, with actions governed by the rights and obligations of relevant members of the community. This theory isolates a set of basic principles that will offer the reader an understanding of the natures of all social phenomena. The Nature of Social Reality is for all those, academics and non-academics alike, who wish to gain a grasp on the nature of social phenomena that goes beyond the superficial.

Download or read book After Positivism written by Nicholas Hoover Wilson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the value of comparison for research in historical sociology? Today, social scientists regularly express doubt about the positivist premises that have long justified comparison’s use: that cases can be unproblematically compared as though they are independent of one another, that comparison can reliably yield valid causal inference, and that comparative methods can grapple with questions of meaning, sequence, and process that are central to historical explanation. Yet they remain reluctant to abandon comparison altogether, not least because comparisons are still manifestly useful in the research process. After Positivism presents a bold new set of warrants and methodologies for comparison that takes these criticisms fully into account. The contributors to this book marshal a wide array of postpositivist approaches to knowledge to reconstruct the analytic potential of comparison for a new generation of social scientists. In addition to providing fresh answers to classic questions about case selection and causal inference, authors ponder the role comparison plays in a world where social phenomena are demonstrably time-, space-, and concept-dependent; where causation is typically conjunctural; where social structures and groups emerge and die; and where important objects of inquiry can be understood only in terms of relationships, emergent properties, or contingent and irregular effects. Engaging and timely, this book will be of interest to all those who seek to improve our explanations of historical change in social-scientific research.

Download or read book Future Information Society, The: Social And Technological Problems written by Wolfgang Hofkirchner and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first volume of a two-volume edition based on the International Society for Information Studies Summit Vienna 2015 on 'The Information Society at the Crossroads. Response and Responsibility of the Sciences of Information' (see summit.is4is.org).The book represents a trans-disciplinary endeavor of the leading experts in the field of information studies posing the question for a better society, in which social and technological innovations help make information key to the flourishing of humanity and dispense with the bleak view of the dark side of information society.It is aimed at readers that conduct research into any aspect of information, information society and information technology, who develop or implement social or technological applications. It is also for those who have an interest in participating in setting the goals for sciences of information and social applications of technological achievements and scientific results.

Download or read book Realist Responses to Post-Human Society: Ex Machina written by Ismael Al-Amoudi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first of a trilogy which investigates, from a broadly realist perspective, the place, and challenges, of the human in contemporary social orders. The authors, all members of the Centre for Social Ontology, ask what is specific about humanity’s nature and worth, and what are their main challenges in contemporary societies? Examining the ways in which recent advances in technology threaten to blur and displace the boundaries constitutive of our shared humanity, Realist Responses to Post-Human Society: Ex Machina explores the philosophical and ethical questions raised by these developments, and discusses the dangers posed by the combination of transhumanism with post-humanist social theories and antihumanist practices, institutions and ideologies.